THOUGHTS ON WHY THERE ARE SO FEW WOMEN RACERS
Formula One boss’s close-minded remark is proof old boys’ club remains a barrier to women
Taru Rinne. Not a name you’ve heard before? Me neither to be perfectly truthful, the Finnish motorcycle racer being barely a footnote in motorsports lore.
Rinne’s main claim to fame was way back in 1989 when she qualified second in the GP125-cc class at Hockenheim, Germany.
Why that is so significant is because just last October it still created news when another woman, Maria Herrera, qualified eighth at the Australian Moto3 round (basically the modern version of Rinne’s GP125).
Yes, 26 years later, with all the progress made in equality of sports, there are still no female protagonists at the top echelon of motorsport.
Rinne’s story is a quick illustration of why. After her breakout season in 1989, Rinne fractured both ankles at Circuit Paul Ricard in France. Soon after, she received notice saying she would no longer be welcome in GP racing.
Yep, a sport that revels in machismo — two-time MotoGP champion Jorge Lorenzo once raced the day after breaking his collarbone — jettisoned its top female racer using the excuse that she was injured.
The saddest past of this story is that Rinne had faced such misogyny before. Indeed, Rinne only took up motorcycle racing after she had been drummed out of four-wheel racing.
Rinne, it seemed, dominated Finnish kart racing — winning two championships — embarrassing the sport’s male hierarchy at a time when women were not supposed to beat men at sports dominated by men.
Having secured her third championship, she was summarily stripped of the title and banned from racing for using illegal fuel, an infraction typically considered so trivial that it usually results in the removal of a few points.
The runner-up who inherited Finland’s karting crown? Mika Hakkinen, who ended up winning the Formula One title twice and is now ranked as the 15th greatest F1 driver of all-time by no less an authority than Autosport magazine.
The sad part of this misogyny has been how self-defeating it has been. Motorcycle racing is in something of an existential crisis, especially in North America where the various series have been flagging and even the highest levels of racing are no longer available on terrestrial television.
Formula One is having a crisis all its own and, while it’s more technically based, it also could use a growth in audience participation.
F1’s grand experiment in “ecofriendly” hybridization has largely fallen on deaf ears, the male audience still the core of Grand Prix fandom not giving a fig for the newfound environmentalism. A younger and more female audience, on the other hand, just might.
And it’s tough to see why young women would enter a sport that seems so lacking in welcome, especially when so many other sports have heroes they can lionize. Indeed, I suspect that little girls emulate little boys in one very key aspect of their formative years: Their utter worship of idols.
Would there be a Eugenie Bouchard — perhaps the world’s most marketable sports figure; are you listening Formula One? — without Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova? Would golf have broadened its appeal without Tiger Woods?
Oh, motorsports does have some role models, but they are usually reserved for the second tier at the outer fringes of racing. And, of course, there’s Danica Patrick, but her career fizzled without crescendo and there’s been no successor since, women still stalled at the “test driver” level in Formula One.
And just as no one grew up worshipping worthy, yet not quite topflight black golfers like Charlie Sifford, Calvin Peete and Lee Elder, little girls can’t idolize poor Susie Wolff — an eminently qualified Williams test driver since 2012 who recently quit the sport without even being allowed to qualify — like boys can with Sebastian Vettel or Fernando Alonso.
So why can’t women break into the top echelons of motorsport?
Well, it certainly isn’t because they can’t handle speed. Three-time NHRA Top Fuel drag-racing champion Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowney routinely hit more than 480 km/h over a quarter mile.
And it’s not because women aren’t tough enough. Is there even one person reading these pages who could last 30 seconds in a cage with Ronda Rousey?
Stamina? Name me one racing driver who could come within spitting distance of British marathoner Paula Radcliffe over 26 miles.
And it surely isn’t support at the grassroots. Attend a junior karting race and you’ll see nearly as many ponytails donning helmets as crew cuts. Indeed, with few exceptions, the organizing bodies of local racing encourage female participation.
I suspect it’s because the very top of motorsport is still dominated by the last remnants of an old boy’s club that still sees the primary role for females in motorsport as umbrella holder on pit row. The official who wrote Rinne to tell her she was no longer welcome in Grand Prix motorcycle racing? According to Rinne, you now know him as Formula One’s supremo. Yup, Bernie Ecclestone.
And to this day, Ecclestone remains a damper on female participation in motorsports. Last week, on the very day Wolff announced her “Dare to be Different” initiative to bring more female drivers into elite motorsport, Ecclestone told TSN we may never see another woman in Formula One (the first to race was Maria Teresa de Filippis in 1958; the last, Lella Lombardi in 1976) because “they wouldn’t be taken seriously ... so they would never have a car that is capable of competing.”
Alice Powell begs to differ. The current GP3 racer, Wolff’s first recruit, recently told the British Press Association, “Someone needs to prove Bernie wrong.”
The way Ecclestone sees it, women should race in something like the all-female series he proposed last year (that, thankfully, automakers declined to support).
Maybe, just maybe, if someone had stood up for Rinne 27 years ago, we wouldn’t still be fighting yesterday’s battle.